Brazil: heaven on Earth... NOT!

You must have seen the statement that Stallone made about Brazil.

You must have seen, also, Brazil being so offended by that.

You must have heard also about the episode of the Simpsons in Brazil.

You may have heard, too, Brazil being so offended by that and the government asking Fox for an apology and banning the episode.

Hold on ... let me understand ...

The French can stink, Portuguese can be dumb, Argentinians can be snob, English can’t know how to cook, Russians can be drunk, Americans are alienated, Japanese are weird ...

But Brazil ... Brazil is perfect.

Is that it?

Fucking hell, if hypocrisy made money Brazil would be rich.

Hold on ... Brazil has a lot of money ... let's change that ...

Fucking hell, if hypocrisy gave you good character, Brazil would be paradise.

That’s better, although paradoxical.

One can’t speak ill of Brazil. And the worst: one can’t say the truth about Brazil.

A guy on TV can spend the entire day talking about how our society is rotten and how people are idiots, but when a foreigner shows up and says all we already know, and suddenly it’s hell.

Brazil behaves like a dysfunctional family that, from the inside, is rotten and chaotic. But upon arrival of visitors (foreigners), everybody loves eachother, everybody behaves, it's all cute, all for the image of the thing.

But god-oh-god if anyone goes there and says it’s nothing like that. Then everybody gets angry, because they are ruining the beautiful image that Brazil tried to pass on.

Brazil is a hypocritical country, with hypocritical people. Brazil, as my Dutch girlfriend rightly said, is great when you're among friends. But still not different from a war the moment you step onto the street.

Gone are the days when we could say we have more hospitality than Europe.

We do have it, inside our homes. But on the streets, Brazil is a battle field and Rambo is right. He is foreigner, he's rich, he brings money to the country with anything he decides to do here.

He says "when you leave Brazil, they give you a monkey to take home with a smile on their faces". And they do indeed. There are people who would give him their daughter, if we let them.

Brazilians must stop being offended when the the truth about it is said and stop requiring that the truth is no longer spoken.

Instead, they should try to change the truth about their own lives: Brazilians learned that to grow in life you must be an asshole and anything below that makes you go live in a favela. We hear that so much that now that this story is true. In Brazil, the thing is just like that.

But Brazilians have no character in traffic, no character in commerce, politics, police ... nothing. Nothing comes to my mind that I can say: There, that thing I can trust in Brazil.

It’s not fun anymore, seriously ...

Spend some time here and you realize that it just could be better ... fuck, the Dutch annoy me with their overly done politeness about everything. Even among friends the thing is so formal that I have to teach them to talk to me, because I can’t talk as if I was a nineteenth century Duke of New York. I’m in no place to forbid them to act as they learned, but I demand that they understand how I am and how I speak, because I’m also forced to deal with their ways. And just because this is their country, it doesn’t mean I have to change myself. They won’t wanna change their ways if they go to Brazil.

But despite that annoying me, you still see that in traffic, police, commerce ... everything works here ... and it goes deep: it's annoying (to us) to see them driving. They know ALL the rules, they obey ALL the rules. It may be 4 am in a village where 800 people live, nobody near you, not even a cat. But they turn the fucking yellow blinking light before turning a corner.

In São Paulo we're almost at the point where you have to thank people if they turn on the little sparkling yellow light before turning or changing lanes.

Yes, you who read this, you know that you also do a lot of crap. If you are Brazilian, you know that you fuck it up one time or another and I don’t care if you don’t like to read this. If you're offended, go read a blog about cooking recipes.

What happens is that everyone likes to read about how other Brazilians suck, but nobody admits that they fuck it up too. Either you don’t turn your yellow light on or you drop the frying pan oil in the sink or you pass through a red light or you cross the street when it’s red for pedestrians. And if you are an officer, you’re just another bastard who only fines people because the commission is good. You don’t care. Actually, you don’t care about anything else. I've seen the police stopping people here just to call them off. Without fines, without getting angry. Just a heads up. And the Dutch go home feeling ashamed.

In Brazil? "Gee, I did well, I won’t have to pay a fine."

They are all small things, but the butterfly effect of all this ends up generating a geometrical progression and the result is Brazil.

So, let's put an end to hypocrisy or shall we just move on with our fairy tale?